The Infrastructure Project of The Future

Leapfrogging into a not-so-distant future, this article explores how technological advancements will significantly impact project delivery.

February 25, 2020

WSP Author

John Welford, Technical Principal – System Engineering, New Zealand

WSP Contributors

Suresh Bhatta, Vice President, Transportation Business Line, Canada

Andrew Porter, Technical Director - Civil, Bridge and Ground, UK

Future infrastructure projects will probably start similarly to those today, based on a prediction of the future needs of the population, but with much of the current guesswork eliminated by significant improvements in modelling; incorporating the use of all the available ‘big data’ and including sophisticated predictions on the behaviour, lifestyles and locations of the future populace. Insights in this area, including predictions of need and risk, may come from the development of large-scale cross-domain models, incorporating sub-models of employment, housing, schooling, transport and similar, and from crowd-sourcing techniques such as prediction markets.